My Feather Baby

Well I figured it was time to update (with lots of prayers that I'm not jinxing myself). Feather pulled through his surgery yesterday and we brought him home that afternoon. No one mentioned that I should expect a dopey unresponsive pig sitting in a pool of blood... But after an emergency run back into the vet clinic we were all set for a sleepless night. I didn't want him left alone in that condition so we took shifts staying up with him and forcefed him hourly. I doubt he enjoyed the experience but he started to snap out of it at about midnight. We are almost at twenty hours post surgery and Feather's looking good. He's awake and alert and even felt well enough to eat some grass on his own.

I'm thinking that once we reach 48 hours post-surgery I can begin to fill confident that he might pull through all of this.

I also had a good chat to the vet about preventing another stone forming. To be honest if Feather does get another stone I'm not sure I'd go through this with him again. It is major surgery and one of the big reasons I was willing to do it was that Feather is only twelve months old. He's at the strongest and healthiest he'll ever be in his life and that gave him that bit more of a chance. If we faced another stone surgery he'd have already had one lot of major surgery and he'll be older. I guess it would still depend on the circumstances.

But as to prevention. Feather will be going on a lifetime course of potassium citrate to help prevent calcium binding in his pee. He'll go on a low calcium diet. I'll add just a touch of his favourite raspberry pedialyte to the water bottle to encourage him to drink. Finally I need to limit his vitamin C to 10mg a day instead of the 20-30mg he has been getting as hypervitaminosis is a possible cause of stones. So he'll be on a special diet for life with daily medication but potassium citrate is beyond cheap ($20 for a kg, and he needs like 0.25g a day) and everything else is simply management.

As to a low calcium diet he can still have the extrulupins (0.2% calcium) and the wheaten/oaten chaff (0.13%-0.3% calcium). I can buy a bale of oaten/wheaten hay for the sheba boys to share with Luther. When I get a minute I'll also do up a list of 'safe' veggies so it'll be easy to know what he can and can't have. But it shouldn't require me to buy anything different. The pigs always get a range of veggies so Feather & Fortinbras will just get the low calcium ones and just a teensy portion each of the vitamin C ones. 10mg is still within the recommended daily intake, I've just always done 20-30mg because I have babies and pregnant sows.

I may also add Cranberry capsules to his daily medications to prevent UTI's as bacteria can also be the cause of bladder stones.